


"Winifred Barnes, Mother of WWII Hero, Dies at 96"

by praximeter (Zimario)



Series: The Night War [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Jewish Character, News Media, POV Outsider, The New York Times, media fic, obituary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 08:17:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11505345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zimario/pseuds/praximeter
Summary: Hoffman, Leah. “Winifred Barnes, Mother of WWII Hero, Dies at 96.”The New York Times8 June 1996: 4. Print.[Can be read as stand-alone]





	"Winifred Barnes, Mother of WWII Hero, Dies at 96"

**Author's Note:**

> Minor spoilers for _The Night War: 60th Anniversary Edition_.

## Winifred Barnes, Mother of WWII Hero, Dies at 96

Mrs. Winifred (Rubin) Barnes, of Brooklyn, died peacefully in her home on June 6. She was 96 years old. Mrs. Barnes was a devoted wife, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. She was preceded in death by her parents, Serviu and Malvina Rubin; her husband George Barnes; daughter Rose Barnes, son and legendary Howling Commando Master Sergeant James “Bucky” Barnes; son Lance Corporal John “Jack” Barnes; daughter-in-law Betty (Bryce) Barnes; grandson Specialist John Barnes II; and son-in-law Robert Proctor.

She is survived by her son Theodore (Alice) Barnes and daughter Rebecca Barnes Proctor. Mrs. Barnes is also survived by her grandchildren, Andrew (Carol) Barnes; Veenie Barnes (Seamus) Cameron; Colonel James B. (Elena) Barnes II; Steven (Leona) Barnes; Dr. Grace Proctor (Russell) Murphy; Dr. Margaret (Jane) Proctor-Hayes; Staff Sergeant Robert (Elizabeth) Proctor; and Barbara Barnes (Samuel) Clarence. Mrs. Barnes was blessed with 22 great-grandchildren: 2nd Lieutenant Andrew (Rachel) Barnes; Air Force Cadet Winifred Barnes; Alexandra Barnes; Sean (Alexa) Cameron; Katherine and Rose Cameron; Patrick, Jacqueline, and Vivian Barnes; Alice, Eric, and Samuel Clarence; James and Christopher Barnes; Anthony, Georgiana, Emily, and Robert Murphy; Joshua and Mackenzie Proctor-Hayes; and Kyle and Mark Proctor.  Mrs. Barnes was also the proud great-great-grandmother of Teddy Cameron, age 4.

Mrs. Barnes was born Golda Winifred Rubin in Brooklyn Heights on August 15, 1899. She attended Brooklyn Female Academy and graduated in 1916 as her class salutatorian. Shortly thereafter, she married Mr. George Barnes of Woodhaven, Queens, and they had their first child James (“Bucky”) in 1917, just months before George was drafted into service. George returned from World War I in early 1919, having served honorably in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Tragedy struck the young couple in 1921, when their infant daughter Rose passed away at only 1 year of age. But over the next ten years, Winifred and George welcomed three more children to the family: Theodore (“Teddy”) (1923), John (“Jack”) (1925), and Rebecca (“Curly”) (1930).

Unofficially, they added a fourth son: Steven Rogers, their son Bucky’s closest childhood friend, and the boy who would grow up to be Captain America.

“Steve called her Ma Barnes, but only after Ma got so sick and tired of hearing him call her Mrs. Barnes that she cornered him one day after he and Bucky got in a fight and said, ‘Steven Grant, if you’re going to be attached at the hip to my boy like it looks you are, you’re going to call me Ma and sit still so I can fix that face,’” recalls Teddy Barnes, now 73. “I think it was more unusual to see Steve and Bucky without black eyes than with, they got into so much trouble.”

Years later, Steve was so close with the Barnes family that they invited him to move into their family home following the untimely death of Steve’s mother, Sarah.

“Invited ain’t the word,” laughs Rebecca Proctor, age 65. “More like browbeat him until he listened. Bucky spent months convincing him, Steve was such a damn proud fool. It was Ma who finally sent me with some cookies over to Steve’s old tenement apartment that made him finally move in. I remember telling Steve that it was all right, only he’d have to sleep in Bucky and Jack’s room ‘cause me and him were gonna get married someday. I was eight.”

Mrs. Barnes was a well-known and much-beloved caretaker in her Brooklyn neighborhood. When World War II broke out and Bucky was drafted in 1940, and later when Teddy, Jack, and Steve all enlisted, she organized monthly dinners with neighborhood Blue Star Mothers and routinely gave local kids cookies to reward their scrap metal collection efforts.

“I remember when Ralph Baird was killed, early in 1942. He’d been in the Marines, and he was on a ship that got sunk in the Pacific, and he was the first boy killed from our neighborhood,” Rebecca recalls. “Ma made Mrs. Baird and her family about a week’s worth of meals, even though were all rationed, and made me and Jack go and deliver them. Didn’t matter that there was a whole block full of ladies who were going to make food too, Ma always considered everybody her own personal responsibility.”

“I don’t think I ever saw her mad at anyone, except at Steve when he went off and became Captain America,” says Rebecca. “It was all so mysterious. One day Steve just didn’t show up to Sunday Dinner like he was supposed to—this was after he and Bucky had gotten their own place. And then we got a letter a couple of weeks later, saying Steve had gotten his 1A and he would write us as regular as he could. See, by then Bucky had shipped out to Europe, Ted was off in training, and Jack was telling anybody who’d listen how he was going to enlist the day he turned 18. So I think Ma was banking on having at least Steve still around and out of danger, on account of him being so sickly.”

But Steve Rogers had a date with destiny. By the summer of 1943, he had successfully become the world’s first super soldier and was beginning his whirlwind tour of the United States as part of a USO troupe. By November, however, Steve would hang up the tights and execute the daring liberation of the Nazi work camp in Azzano, Italy that had imprisoned his best friend, Bucky.

“We didn’t even know Bucky’d been captured,” says Rebecca. “Letters were so slow back then. The last letter we’d gotten from him was from September, after Salerno. It was only when the newsreels showed Steve and Bucky and all those fellows rescued that we even found out what had happened. Ma was spitting mad when we got a letter from Bucky a couple weeks later, not saying a single word about any of it, about being a POW, except that he was sorry for being slow to write and that all was well.”

The rest of the war was a whirlwind for the Barnes family. Teddy was in England as a member of the 101st Airborne Division. Bucky and Steve were newsreel fixtures as the Howling Commandos. On D-Day, Teddy parachuted behind enemy lines while his brother and adoptive brother stormed Omaha Beach. While Bucky and Steve and the Commandos battled their way through Saint-Martin-de-Mer and Brégandes, Teddy fought at Carentan. “I never got to see Bucky and Steve in Normandy,” recalls Teddy with a fond smile, “but I sure did hear about them a lot.”

Throughout the rest of 1944, all three soldiers made their way through Europe: France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and would eventually share a battlefield in the Ardennes. Back home, Jack married his sweetheart and deployed to the Pacific. By January 1945, Mrs. Barnes had four boys in combat.

The bad news started arriving that same month. In the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, Teddy was wounded by shrapnel and evacuated from the line. In March, Bucky was killed in action just days after his 28th birthday. Weeks later, Captain America—Ma Barnes’s “Stevie”—was killed in action while sabotaging the plane carrying a bomb payload destined for the Eastern Seaboard. He was 26 years old. In May, Jack was killed in action in the Battle of Okinawa. He was 19. The following month, Mrs. Barnes’s young daughter-in-law and Jack’s widow Betty Bryce Barnes, died in childbirth delivering twins Andrew and Veenie.

“Ma was so very quiet,” recalls Teddy, who was honorably discharged in June 1945. With Jack and Bucky both gone, Teddy was subject to the Sole Survivor Policy, which releases soldiers from service following the deaths of their siblings. “All of Brooklyn was quiet. Steve and Bucky, they were all of Brooklyn’s boys. And Jack, with poor Betty gone and two little babies orphaned the same day they were born, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so devastated as Ma in 1945.”

But Ma Barnes wasn’t Ma Barnes for nothing. In late 1945, she stoically accepted not only her son Bucky’s Medal of Honor from President Truman, but also the Medal of Honor awarded to Captain America, who had listed her as his next of kin.

At 46 years old and a three-time Gold Star Mother, she reckoned she would need to be the mother that little Andrew and Veenie had lost, and threw herself into caring for them. She began attending Temple again, after having given up her Jewish community when she’d married her Catholic husband.

In 1947, she and Rebecca decided to publish Bucky’s unedited wartime journals, which had been returned to them by surviving Howling Commando Gabe Jones after the war. In one of only a handful of interviews about the book, which they titled “The Night War,” Mrs. Barnes simply said: “English has no word for a mother who loses her children, yet I do find some comfort in what Rabbi Grollman said: grief shared is grief diminished. Through my beloved son’s words, you know him; and to know him is to love him. Perhaps our grief can be diminished together.”

But tragedy wasn’t finished with the Barnes family. In March 1948, George Barnes died from a head injury he sustained in a bar fight. He was 54.

“Our uncle Sean always said Dad didn’t come back the same from the War,” says Teddy. “Of course, we didn’t know any different--sometimes Dad just ‘went away,’ is what we called it, or he’d drink a little too much and just forget where he was. He was better by the time the war rolled around. But he had a real hard time after Bucky and Jack. A real hard time. I think it was just too much for him at the end.”

Mrs. Barnes handled this new blow with every bit of grace she was known for. She moved herself and her two grandbabies to a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, paid for out of her son Bucky’s life insurance. She supported her daughter Rebecca through nursing school and waved her goodbye when she shipped out in 1951 to serve in Korea.

In 1965, she helped survivors of the Friedwald concentration camp, which the Howling Commandos had liberated less than a month before Bucky’s death, to organize a charitable foundation based in  Brooklyn. That same year, Israeli politician and Friedwald survivor Yitzhak Steinhaus personally visited Mrs. Barnes to present her with two honors. The first was a plaque declaring Steve Rogers “Righteous Among the Nations,” a recognition of non-Jews who risked themselves to help Jews during the Holocaust. The second was Israel’s highest military honor at the time: the Hero of Israel decoration, which was posthumously awarded to Bucky.

In 1970, Ma Barnes repeated history when she had her two grandchildren, Andrew and Veenie, deliver a week of meals to a set of parents who had lost their son in Vietnam. This time, though, it wasn’t simply a neighborhood boy: it was her grandson, John “Johnny” Barnes II, her son Ted’s firstborn, who had been killed in action. Like his uncle Jack, Johnny died before reaching his 20th birthday.

“The day we learned Johnny had been killed,” recalls Teddy, his voice quivering with grief, “I remember thinking, ‘God, how did Ma survive this three times?’”

The answer, Rebecca believes, was her mother’s calling to service. “She lived for others, putting all her energy and love into her family and her community. It restored her. It gave her purpose.”

That remarkable commitment to service is surely Winifred Barnes’s legacy. She sent all of her children to serve in the armed forces, one of whom became one of the 20th century’s most revered war heroes. Of her grandchildren, three served, including Colonel James Barnes II, who has piloted four space shuttle missions as a NASA astronaut. One of her grandchildren is a firefighter. Two work in healthcare as a nurse and a doctor. Another granddaughter works for the UN. One of her great-grandchildren graduated West Point and another will graduate the Air Force Academy next year.

“I may not have done much here in this life,” said Mrs. Barnes with her characteristic humility last year at her last public appearance, at a ceremony commemorating V-J Day's 50th anniversary. “But my family certainly has. And I could not be more proud.”

 

 

© 1996 The New York Times Company

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Basically this came about because I wrote the life stories for Bucky's entire family tree, 1893-2018, and made myself sad thinking that Bucky could have had a chance to see his mother again sometime between 1991-1996... if only.


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